‘I’m sorry, Frau Dienstag.’

There were no tears in her eyes. A little smile played around her mouth. ‘He had worked in the Air Ministry and he was very like you, sir. Not in looks, but something else. I can’t describe it, but you remind me of him.’ Suddenly she shrank away from him and her hand slipped from his grasp. ‘You don’t expect anything from me, do you? All the soldiers in this city, they offer bread and soap and cigarettes but I always know what they want in return.’

‘No, I want nothing like that from you.’

‘Yes, you are very like my Johann. He was angry like you.’

‘Do you think I’m angry?’

‘Of course. You have reason, don’t you?’

He shrugged. Angry with the Nazis, yes. But who wouldn’t be? ‘So your friends in this so-called Red Orchestra . . .’

‘That is what the Gestapo called us because some of us were communists. Not all though. We were just people who hated Nazis. That was the one thing that bound us together. We printed leaflets and posters to tell the people what was truly happening in the East. And we helped fugitive Jews.’

‘So the Red Orchestra – your friends – looked after Miriam?’

‘They would have moved her from house to house every few days. Perhaps they found a remote farm in the countryside where she could be kept safe. But after the arrests of August 1942, who knows? When I said I know where she is, I meant I know that she escaped the initial round-up. Whether she survived, I cannot say. When I walk these streets it surprises me that anyone is alive.’

‘So you never saw her again?’

‘No. But I would very much like to. She was a lovely girl. I lived just across the road from her in Wolfsstrasse, though my home is no more. We had long conversations, and she told me about a pen friend she had, a Dutch boy. I think she was a little in love with him.’

Chapter 23

Chapter 23

Wilde and Heck met as planned at 6 p.m. ‘We have to get to Nuremberg as soon as possible,’ Wilde said. ‘Helms has fixed us a flight from Gatow at 7 a.m.’

‘Are you going to explain any of that, Professor?’

‘I discovered something in my interrogation of Fritzsche.’ He outlined his talk with the Soviet prisoner, and his revelation that an SS man named Julius Boden had quietly appeared in the bunker, then just as silently vanished at the same time as Hanna Reitsch. ‘Fritzsche also told me that Baldur von Schirach may be able to tell me more about the mysterious Mr Boden.’

‘Baldur von Schirach? Oh, I know all about him. He founded the Hitler Youth, then became governor of Vienna. The worst kind of fucking Nazi. Signed the deportation orders to ship out Vienna’s Jews to the camps. I would like to kill him.’